Around their first birthdays, infants begin to point, walk, and talk. These abilities are appreciable both by researchers with strictly standardized criteria and caregivers with more relaxed notions of what each of these skills entails. Here, we compare the onsets of these skills and links among them across two data collection methods: observation…

For the last 20 years, developmental psychologists have measured the variability in lexical development of infants and toddlers using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs)--the most widely used parental report forms for assessing language and communication skills in infants and toddlers. We show that CDI reports can…

As welfare-to-work reforms increase women's labor market attachment, the lives of their young children are likely to change. This note draws on a random-assignment experiment in Connecticut to ask whether mothers' rising employment levels and program participation are associated with changes in young children's early learning and cognitive growth.…